Delivering the Internet Via Drone...And Laser

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Inside a lab at Facebook, Yael Maguire is building infrared lasers, Earth-orbiting satellites, and a fleet of flying drones powered by the light of the sun. It sounds more like the plot of the latest James Bond movie than the work of a social networking company. But Maguire’s project is a direct path to the future of Facebook—and the Internet as a whole.

Maguire oversees what Facebook calls its Connectivity Lab. With those lasers, satellites, and drones, he and his team of engineers are working to bring the Internet to all those people on Earth who don’t already have it. Think vast swaths of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The satellites and drones will beam signals down to these areas, using microwaves and maybe even those infrared lasers.

Facebook wants to “connect the unconnected,” says Maguire, pointing out that about two-thirds of the world’s population is not yet online. And this requires some new gear. “We realized there wasn’t one technology that could connect everyone,” the former MIT quantum computing researcher explains. “We needed a set of technologies.”

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The project isn’t mere philanthropy. If more people are on the net, more people will use Facebook, after all, as well as the many other online services offered by the company, from Messenger to Instagram to WhatsApp. (Google is trying something similar in building Google Fiber, its ultra-high-speed wireline Internet service, and with Project Loon, which will deliver the Internet to underserved areas via high-altitude balloons.) For tech giants, extending the Internet into the skies makes good economic sense.

This doesn’t mean that Facebook will end up as an honest-to-goodness Internet service provider that competes with the likes of AT&T and Comcast. But in developing these satellites and drones, Maguire and his team can push ISPs and other companies toward a more expansive Internet. Facebook could help power the services offered by others, for example, or it could share its designs so others could build their own flying gear. Or the project could simply pressure others to expand global Internet access.

Maguire has already shown that this can work. Before Facebook tapped him to oversee the Connectivity Lab, he helped bootstrap another seemingly quixotic effort to remake an industry: Facebook’s Open Compute Project.

About four years ago, Maguire and a small team of Facebook engineers started making all sorts of hardware that could more efficiently run its vast online empire, including servers, networking gear, even entire data centers. It was a necessary thing. Traditional gear from the likes of Dell and HP just didn’t make sense. But rather than keep these designs to themselves, Maguire and Facebook made them open-source and shared them with the world.

62% | Portion of the world’s population not yet online

The idea was to boost innovation and force the larger market to start building similar gear, ultimately driving down the cost of this hardware. And it’s working. Other big online names have joined the Open Compute Project, including Apple and Microsoft, looking to promote the same idea. And indeed, traditional hardware sellers like Dell and HP are now selling gear based on Facebook’s designs.

Today the Toronto native is bringing this same mentality to the Connectivity Lab. The company is still tight-lipped about how things will play out. But according to Jay Parikh, vice president of infrastructure engineering, Facebook’s satellites and drones will in some ways follow in the footsteps of its Open Compute gear. “A lot of the things that we’ve learned—that we’ve been working on from a philosophical perspective in the Open Compute Project—help us get in the right mindset when it comes to connecting 4 billion to 5 billion more people to the Internet,” he says.

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The basic aim, Maguire says, is to use the right tech to complement what’s already out there, including Google’s Project Loon. So in sparsely populated areas, the satellites can transmit Internet signals to base stations on the ground, and these stations will then use wirelines or cellular networks to share the feed with homes, offices, and phones. Meanwhile, the solar-powered flying drones can serve more densely populated areas. “For suburban and rural, we expect the planes to be better than satellites in some scenarios,” Maguire says.

These satellites and drones may send signals with microwaves, a common way of delivering data through airspace. But Maguire and team are also exploring infrared lasers—the same basic tech used by your TV clicker. These can send much larger amounts of data over frequencies that typically go unused. “It’s like a really fancy TV remote,” he says.